Full transcript: James Rickards on London Real
2:38 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jim Rickards, the American lawyer and investment banker, turned economist, thought leader and author. You have over 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street while also acting as an advisor to the CIA and the Pentagon. You are a New York Times bestselling author and your upcoming book, Money GPT, AI and the Threat to the Global Economy, looks at the danger AI poses to national security and the global financial order.
3:16 You are also known as the man who predicted the biggest financial crash in American history. And right now you believe that a second crisis in the banking system could happen at any moment. With President Biden dropping out of the race and Kamala Harris the new nominee, you are predicting, quote, at least another month of political chaos. You do believe that Donald Trump will ultimately win the election on November 5th, but that the Democrats will block him from office by declaring him an insurrectionist.
3:42 Brian Rose: Jim, welcome back to London Real.
3:44 Jim Rickards: Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you. That was good. Thanks for the intro, but also a very good list of what’s going on.
3:50 It’s almost my job is basically taking in current events and political events and all that processing and doing analysis for people. But the input side of the equation is getting pretty dense. You know, as I was saying, we are now clearly living in a simulation because you can’t make up some of this stuff. I mean, literally, you know, a bullet caught on high speed camera going toward Trump’s heads, you know, the debates, the convention, you know, Biden bowing out, Kamala now hitting the pavement with this brand new narrative.
4:21 Brian Rose: I mean, where do we begin, Jim?
4:23 Jim Rickards: Where do we begin? Well, you’re right. I think it was London. I’m going to paraphrase.
4:28 He said there are years when almost nothing happens and there are weeks when 10 years of stuff happens. We’ve just been through four weeks with about 10 years of, you know, kind of headline events. People know the rundown starting on June 27th with the Biden debate face plant. He really did look like a corpse. I mean, I don’t know who did the white makeup, but not a good job.
4:52 Then we had the Trump attempted assassination. Sadly, Cory Cumpentry was killed and two others were severely wounded. So we think about them and their families and, of course, the Trump family. Then within days, the Republican National Convention selection of J.D. Vance, that’s a selection I applaud.
5:11 I can give reasons for that in terms of economic policy. I think it’s a very big deal. But there’s certainly, you know, you’re what they call the country club Republicans are all upset because J.D. Vance is not your typical Lindsey Graham warmonger, you know, Kilmore Ukrainian type of Republicans. He’s a lot more sensible than that.
5:29 And then quickly pivot to coup d’etat. I think in terms of Biden leaving, this was not always sitting around with the family talking over, I guess I’ll withdraw. No, this was a coup d’etat. It was bloodless lately so far, if you don’t count Trump. But I don’t I can’t think of a better way to describe it, having worked at the CIA for 10 years and pretty immersed in the history of the whole thing.
5:53 I know how these things happen. And I think we just saw it in America. And then Biden finally drops out with a gun to his head. No one knows to sign the letter. It looks like an auto pen.
6:04 It was not a White House stationary. It was clearly couldn’t write it. I would say he didn’t write it, not because of grammar syntax or anything like that, but just because he can’t write. So somebody wrote it. Somebody used an auto pen.
6:16 Somebody pushed out on Twitter how much he knew about his own decision to withdraw. Not clear. Maybe not very much. And then here comes Kamala. I love the way.
6:26 I don’t mean to do like a political op ed, Brian. But I mean, these are all facts. The Democrats are always, you know, Trump’s the threat to democracy. We’re the party of democracy. We have to defend democracy.
6:35 Excuse me. You had a six month primary process, which was democratic. 15 million votes. And you just tore him up, threw him in the trash, got in the back room, said, Kamala is the one, you know, rounded up, whipped the delegates. Yeah, OK, we agree.
6:51 And they’re actually they’ve gone so far. They’re doing a they’re doing a virtual online nominating process that’s going to start August 1st. So next week, you know, coming up soon. And so the convention conventions are kind of for show anyway. The last time the last time there was a contested convention where the delegates went and they and they fought it out and picked a winner.
7:14 It was 1952. It was Robert Taft and Dwight Eisenhower. So so they’ve been kind of like preplanned. But at least they vote. At least they voted somebody counts the votes here.
7:23 The nomination will be done before the convention. So I see no purpose in the convention. I say it could be a good party, but they’re going to be 100000 pro Hamas, pro terror protesters in the streets of Chicago with a mayor who is not Rickards Daley. You’re not going to see any police enforcement. So I don’t even know how we’ll see how that plays out.
7:42 But so the whole thing when you say you said you can’t make it up. And I would say if you were dealing with real people, normal circumstances, you had to come up with a scenario. You can’t make it up. But in a world of A.I., who knows what we’re seeing? That’s really the point.
7:58 So there’s an awful lot on the table. But we have to go from there. We can’t just kind of like it’s not a movie after all. But so it looks like Trump and Kamala, although I never was Kamala Kamala. She doesn’t know either.
8:14 So how should I. But the Democrats are so ruthless. I mean, what if. And I’m not necessarily forecasting this. But what if a few weeks from now or September 1st or whatever, she’s faring very badly in the polls.
8:29 I mean, remember, she ran in 2020. Never made it to the first primary. She withdrew before the first primary. Never got a single vote. And her money dried up.
8:39 And everyone’s like, forget her. Let’s pivot. They had a list, you know, Klobuchar and Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, until they all got run off the road. And they picked Biden, who stayed in the basement. But what if she’s doing poorly?
8:53 And they do this again. If you have one coup d’état, why not two? Why not pull her out? Because the Democratic National Committee can just change the rules, and they can pick somebody else. So you can’t rule that up.
9:05 Let’s just say it’s Trump and Kamala Harris. I would stick to my forecast that Trump’s going to win. But it’s not – it’s a little tighter than with Biden. Biden was almost clear-cut. You could get a pretty good forecast of the electoral vote.
9:22 You know, people around the world, and you know, I travel overseas a lot. They always say, you know, Jim, I don’t understand American politics. And I say, well, that’s OK. Americans don’t understand it either. But you’ll be hearing a lot – you are hearing a lot about, you know, Trump and Kamala and a virtual tie, you know, 47 Trump, 46 Kamala.
9:40 You know, that’s within the margin of error. So, you know, call it a virtual tie, if you want, et cetera. Among registered voters, OK, not sure. You got to read the crosstabs and the fine print in terms of sampling and all that stuff. But so what?
9:54 That’s not how we elect presidents in the United States. We do not have a nationwide popular vote. What we have is state-by-state – yeah, there’s a popular vote at the state level, but it’s winner-take-all with only two exceptions. They don’t matter very much, Maine and Nebraska. But it’s winner-take-all in terms of the electoral votes.
10:10 And then you add up the electoral votes. You got to get to 270. So your path to victory is state-by-state. There are a bunch of states that are just going to go to Trump. No one disputes it.
10:19 There are a bunch of states that are just going to go to Kamala. She’s the nominee, it looks likely. No one disputes that. And then you get down to, depending on how you count, seven or ten battleground states. And Trump is leading in every one of them and actually widened the battlefield.
10:35 So there are certain states that were not on the list that got on the list because they were considered definitely Democrat. And they’re like, oh, no, actually, no, it’s close. Trump could win. Those were Virginia, New Mexico – Virginia, New Mexico, and Minnesota. And maybe New Hampshire.
10:56 New Hampshire’s on some of the lists. That’s where I’m coming from. In addition to the seven that were definitely battleground states and Trump is doing very well in all of them. Now, we don’t have good, reliable polling at this point post-Kamala. So let’s get her coronated.
11:13 She seems – she’s going by the – I think with the younger – the TikTok group, they call her Queen Brat. So if I use that expression, you know where that comes from. But she’s the Queen Brat. But we haven’t – she’s not officially nominated yet. We haven’t had really good, reliable polling.
11:30 We’ll see. I would expect those trends to continue. And here’s why – here’s why, Brian. It’s not just, you know, political preference or anything else. She’s a really lousy candidate.
11:41 It’s not – policies matter, of course. But it’s not all about policy. I, you know, got a few pats on the back in 2016. I was one of the really handful of people, five or six, who predicted that Trump would win for the election, not like claiming credit after the fact. Live TV with, apparently, a lock button, Bloomberg.
12:02 Before the election, I told her Trump would win. Her jaw, you know, nearly dropped to the floor. But there were reasons for that. And one of them was I said that Hillary Clinton was just an awful candidate. People didn’t like her.
12:18 Again, you could like her policies, but she – and people have a third choice, apart from the candidates. And leave me aside, you know, R.F.K. Jr. and Jill Stein. A couple of third-party candidates who might make a decent choice.
12:30 But that aside, you can just stay home. That’s another way to exercise your right to vote. And that’s what happened in some of these key states. So Kamala Harris has – she’s not cognitively impaired the way Biden is. She’s not – no one says she has dementia or anything of the kind.
12:48 She’s just not very bright. I mean, she’s kind of a dunce, to be honest. And she – pardon me, go into detail in terms of how she made her way to the top. This is a family program, after all. But she’s the perfect example of DEI.
13:04 Just, you know, continually – and, you know, she has this appeal to the African-American community. She’s not an African-American. Her mother was Sri Lankan, beautiful country. Her father was Jamaican. She grew up in Canada and then moved to the United States.
13:18 She’s a citizen, you know, she qualifies. I don’t dispute that, but the notion that she’s the African-American candidate, I mean, that’s an invention. But she’s just not that smart. And the – you know, people use the phrase word salad. Like, give her – I used to say, who’s her writer, you know, because you couldn’t – her syntax and logic are so convoluted.
13:44 You listen to her for three or four minutes or longer, and you just stop and say, what did she just say? Like, what was that? And it’s not a garble of the slur like Biden. It’s just, wow, it’s – it’s like – it’s the way some adults talk to third graders, and I don’t talk to third graders. I have grandchildren and the other young – I don’t talk to third graders in some kind of baby talk.
14:04 I talk to them, you know, like adults, and, you know, that’s how you bring up their, you know, vocabulary and thought processing and all that. You don’t talk to children like children. You try to, you know, bring up their game. But she talks to adults as if she were talking down to a third grader. That’s the best way to describe it, and you just shake your head.
14:27 So that – again, I look back at her 2020 performance. I look at her public speaking as vice president. Her failures, the borders are. I love – I saw that Orwellian history erasing going on right now, sending things down the memory hall. I love there’s a reporter for Politico who said, you know, Kamala Harris was never the border czar.
14:49 I don’t know where Republicans get that talking point. And somebody did the research, and they found out the same reporter who said she was never the border czar three years ago reported, Kamala Harris is the new border czar. I mean, of course she was the border czar. I mean, there’s no official title. It’s not in the plumb book.
15:04 It’s like – that’s what everyone called her, the press, the media, liberal and conservative. She was the border czar. She never visited the border. I think she made it to Texas once, but not actually to the border. She talked about root causes.
15:19 She was thinking of Goodwill in Dacer to Guatemala, but that was about it, and that did nothing, washed her hands of it, knew it was a losing proposition. And the border’s been open. We’ve had estimates very – pardon me, perhaps as many as 7 or 8 million illegal aliens across the borders over the course of the Biden administration. So that’s a major failure. And then they just stopped giving her stuff because she bungled all of it.
15:42 So between her, very kind of at best medium, maybe low IQ, inability to kind of string words together, failure in terms of policy, the cackling. But the cackling, if you know anything about behavior, it’s a tick. It’s a response to the fact that she really can’t talk. She can’t articulate, so it’s just cackles. You know, some people clam up.
16:10 Some people run and hide. But that’s her defense mechanism, but it’s not going to go over well with the American people.
16:18 Brian Rose: Now, Jim, some people are saying it’s a genius move because now the honeymoon period might get her to the election and she didn’t have to go through the rigorous year-long process. And also, you might just fall out of love with someone. They say what a familiarity breeds contempt.
16:35 But then on the other hand, Trump made some major inroads into, say, Silicon Valley as they kept Biden as this blatant example of incompetence. And Trump really turned to David Sachs and all of his colleagues and all these other people who finally come out and said, wow, I spent some time with a guy and I really like him. And so I can’t tell who’s winning the chess game or if there is even a chess game or if it’s throwing darts at a board. I mean, wise, is there an advantage to her coming out this late?
17:07 And do you think any of this was ever planned or not?
17:10 Jim Rickards: Yes and yes. There’s a definite advantage to her coming out late. Just as in 2020, Biden ran the basement strategy. I mean, at a couple of rallies, they were like at night and driving movie theaters.
17:22 Pardon me during COVID, you know, which is a whole other story. But they invited people to come in their cars and park in the driveway and flash their lights. And they were like 15 cars. Meanwhile, Trump was outdoors, 25, indoors or outdoors, 25,000 people all over the country. But Biden basically stayed in the basement.
17:39 The less we see of Kamala, the better it is for her. Right. She’s weak and not likable. And I would say Hillary’s not dumb. Hillary has a pretty high IQ, but she’s not likable for a lot of other reasons.
17:53 But Kamala is kind of mentally weak and not likable. So the less you see of her, the better. The more it’s an image, and Trump’s a dictator, Trump’s a Nazi, whatever. That plus killing babies is really all they have. So that’s the Democratic platform.
18:09 But so coming out late is a definite advantage. I mean, if she had had to go, well, the Democrats, I mean, there were a couple of contenders during the early primary season, including RFK Jr. And they ran them out of the party. I mean, who’s more of a Democratic family going back at least to the 1920s, maybe earlier than the Kennedys? Nobody.
18:28 They had a president, a presidential candidate, two senators, an attorney general, members of Congress, et cetera, through generations. They ran him out of the party. He’s now still running as an independent. They said he actually would have put on a good campaign in New Hampshire. And they changed the rules.
18:49 They said, well, we’re moving to New Hampshire back behind South Carolina in terms of the primary. New Hampshire said, you know, go jump off a cliff. We’re first, because it’s actually a state law. And they said, well, okay, anyone who runs in New Hampshire, your delegates don’t count. And by the way, we’re going to disqualify your other delegates because you broke the rules.
19:06 Sussman Kennedy just gave up and declared independent. So kind of to do the alternate history scenario of what if somebody else had run, you know, doesn’t work. But that was totally orchestrated. I mean, and I love the hypocrisy in the media over the past month, particularly after the June 27th debate. Yeah, it’s been about a month.
19:26 We’re shocked, shocked that Biden can’t speak and is cognitively impaired in slurs as words. And, you know, we finally beat Medicare, whatever that means. But I knew it four years ago. I’m not a doctor. It was obvious four years ago.
19:41 It was obvious to everyone four years ago. What we’ve seen is a large four-year, well, three and a half year stretch of cognitive dissonance, denial, lies, cover-ups, you know, pick your term. Well, all of the above. And if you said something about it, it’s like, you know, you were, I don’t know what you were, you were a bad person. So everyone knew it.
20:04 Everyone in Washington knew it. Everyone in the White House knew it. And they just put up a wall of lies. The most dangerous part of lies and propaganda, which are very powerful, but the most dangerous part is when you start to believe it yourself. You know, you’re trying to get the world to believe it and the ways of doing that.
20:20 But they start to believe it themselves. And then so just the, you know, the op-eds and the interviews last month, I was shocked. Why didn’t you tell us Silicon Valley? We never would have written all those checks if only we had known. Everybody knew.
20:32 But what they did, and this is going back to your point, Brian, about how planned was this, just string Biden along as far as you possibly can and then push him out. And I did say, by the way, I wrote an article in my newsletter, Strategic Intelligence, that the date on the edition was October 2023. But we actually write it in September. You know, it’s like any publication. You do it all in advance.
20:56 So I wrote this in September 2023, which is over 10 months ago. And I said the Democrats are going to kick out Biden and bring in somebody from the bench. You know, we didn’t know who. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, you know, obviously Kamala would have been one of them. But I said it in writing 10 months ago when I knew he was mentally impaired four years ago.
21:17 So all this fake shock about what actually happened. But the explanation for it is that it worked exactly as planned, that Biden was the puppet through the – Now, you knew that it couldn’t be before the primaries were over. The coup d’etat could not be before the last primary because that would have been messy because all of a sudden you would have people jumping into the primaries, and they didn’t want that. That’s called democracy, and that’s the last thing the Democrats want.
21:45 But it had to be before the convention because if you have an open convention, then, you know, jump on me. They like Mickey Hale, who knows? But that’s one where, you know, the Illinois delegation could have said, you know, Jay Pritzker’s our guy, you know, and then you get into a real fight. So they didn’t want an open primary. They didn’t want an open convention.
22:05 So what I said is the window is kind of from mid-June to mid-August, well, end of July. There we are. But when you see things like that that validate the thesis, it gives credence to the thesis, which is that this whole thing was orchestrated. Now, okay, Biden’s gone. Now we have Kamala.
22:25 She didn’t have to get a single vote. She didn’t have to contest in the primaries. She will not have to contest at the convention. It’s just an anointing. That’s why we call her Queen Brad.
22:37 And we go from there. But now the asset test is, okay, you’ve made it this far, you know, 100 days to go, approximately. But what about a debate? I mean, okay. They don’t have to debate.
22:52 There’s no rule that says you have to. That’s up to the candidates. I have a hard time thinking they won’t debate, but the idea of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on the same stage. I was looking forward to J.D. Vance and Kamala, because that would be in the vice presidential debate.
23:05 That would be fun. This one, I don’t know. They might have to get the mercy rule or, you know, it’s like, you know, how it goes down when Joe Frazier got knocked out. Frazier goes down, you know, but I don’t, I don’t know how they’re going to get through that because there is no teleprompter. They can give you softball questions.
23:23 And, you know, remember Obama with the, in the CNN debate, I think he gets Mitt Romney. He was, Kennedy Crowley was the moderator. And Obama, he helped me out here, Kennedy. He got stuck with something. He turns to the moderator for like a prompt on a live debate.
23:38 But, but there’s a limit to that. So I would expect that that will, maybe they won’t do it. I mean, that’s, that’s the answer. Really just don’t do it. Just kind of keep, keep going.
23:50 So having said all that, Brian, it’s the biggest mistake Republicans could make would be to think this is over. It’s not over. It’s going to come down to the wire. We haven’t even talked about, you know, kind of rigging the election. The problem with the thing with Biden is it was getting to the point where it was too big to rig.
24:09 Meaning you could rig it to some extent with, you know, pre-printed ballots and just running through the scanners at 3 a.m. and all the kind of stuff they did in Georgia and Philadelphia and Phoenix, based in Maricopa County, Arizona. But if you’re within, you know, 50,000 votes and you can truck in 100,000, that works. But Trump’s margins were so big that it was probably beyond, you know, too big to rig was the expression. That may not be true in the case of Kamala.
24:38 And the biggest variable are white women, college-educated white women. They, I don’t know what they taught them in college or what their priorities are, but they, you know, Trump’s ahead with men, not ahead, but very much trending his way with African-American men, African-Americans in general, Hispanics. It turns out Hispanics don’t like illegal immigration. A lot of them came here illegally. I’m all for, I love, you know, I was a black American studies major.
25:11 I mean, I love the Hispanic culture, and I’m pro-immigration provided it’s legal. But these are people who did it legally. You know, I was once, I was now at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn. I was on another case. But it was a nice day, and it was early, and I was waiting outside.
25:30 And this woman came out of the courthouse and she was clutching an American flag. It was folded in the triangle. You know, this is the right way to fold the flag. And she came up to me and said, handed me herself, said, would you take a picture of me, please? I said, of course.
25:45 So I step back, take a frame it, take a picture, hand it back to her. And she was in tears. She said, I’ve just been sworn in as a U.S. citizen, and I wanted to take a picture of the event. And I was almost in tears.
25:56 I mean, you know, imagine what, you got to apply, get a green card. There’s a waiting period. There are legal fees, take a test. I mean, it’s not like walking in or getting a driver’s license. That’s the way to do it, and she’ll make a great American citizen.
26:11 But, you know, what we have is, but that’s the Hispanic community in the U.S. They don’t like all the immigrants, and by the way, they’re not mostly Hispanic. I mean, they’re Afghanis, Africans, Congolese, you know, obviously a lot of Hispanics, but Chinese, et cetera. So that, those votes are trending Trump’s way. So he’s got men gaining in minorities, Hispanics.
26:41 The younger people actually are going for Trump. You know, if you’re 21 and, or if you’re 19, let’s say, you know, the voting age is 18, so let’s say you’re 19 or 20. Well, you were, you know, probably playing video games during the last election. You don’t necessarily have strong impressions of what happened in 2020. You know, a lot of the Trump propagandists kind of came and went, maybe you’re still playing video games, maybe you’re an engineer, who knows, but the point is the young people are much more open-minded than a lot of the ideologues think, and they’re trending to Trump.
27:14 So Trump’s doing well with every group except white women, and I don’t know what it is. But the problem is that upper-middle-class white women are concentrated in certain places like Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Montgomery County, Maryland, Loudoun County, Virginia, you know, around some of the major cities and in places like Maricopa County, Arizona. And they can swing elections. They were not favoring Biden. Biden was just too weak, too far gone.
27:45 Maybe they would go to Trump if they’re undecided. Maybe they would stay home. But now that they have Kamala, she fits the bill. You know, she has the right image. That vote could go her way, and that’s a big deal.
27:59 So it also affects the congressional seats. So I wouldn’t take anything for granted, and I don’t think Trump is, by the way. I think his campaign is doing a great job. Money is going to be even. You know, you’re right.
28:11 Trump’s getting more and more from Silicon Valley. Elon Musk. I like Elon Musk said, I’m going to give Trump $45 million a month. It was like an allowance. I mean, usually these guys, you know, I know a certain number of these billionaires, they’ll write a $20 million check, or, you know, some of them, Adelson and some others have read a $100 million check.
28:29 But then that’s it. That’s their commitment. But Elon’s like 45 a month, you know, for the next three months, typically, Elon. But that’s big money, and that’s coming in. But, you know, Kamala will get her money from, you know, the Soros Organization, ActBlue, small donations.
28:46 So I don’t think one side or the other has an edge on money. They’ve got advertising talent. It does come down. I mean, you need all that. I’m not saying you can prevail without that.
28:57 You need it. But they have it. So what’s the control variable? What’s the differentiating variable? It’s the candidate themselves.
29:04 And Trump’s, you know, proven. I do see, and you have to have been through something like this to understand it, but when you go through a trauma and an assassination attempt, getting your ear blown off would qualify. But, you know, traumatic brain injury, you know, really messy divorce, some kind of reversal fortune, financial setback, a big one, and other kinds of things. I was a good analyst. You don’t come out the same.
29:32 You survive. Well, you can survive. Not everyone does, but you can survive. But post-traumatic stress syndrome is a real thing. Sometimes it hits you within days.
29:42 Sometimes it hits you years later. It’s like a little time bomb. But Trump came out of that assassination attempt, a different person. Maybe a better person. You know, there’s a positive side to this.
29:55 You saw it in his address. You saw it at the convention. A little, maybe a little more thoughtful. These are not things you associate with Trump. You think of him as very impulsive, you know, and he is.
30:07 But he’s also very creative at the same time. But so there’s a little more kind of sober, I mean, doesn’t drink, but, you know, just behaviorally sober, restrained Trump. That’s probably a good thing. A little more mature, maybe, which, again, 78, you know, changed very much. But I think that’s a positive thing.
30:26 But he’s definitely not the same person he was.
30:28 Brian Rose: Talk to me about, on the day, and I agree with you, you know, he was a different guy walking into the convention. The speech at the convention, he definitely seemed more emotional. He said, I’m going to tell you what happened that day, and I’m never going to talk about it again. He kissed the helmet of Cory.
30:44 But, of course, now, a week later, he’s back out on the trail, and he seems much more back to normal. He’s telling that story again, but I agree. We still don’t know how that might affect him. What about on the day, Jim? I mean, you know, you’ve spent a lot of time, you know, in politics, in the world.
31:00 You know, for you to watch that and process what happened in the aftermath, even the Secret Service grilling and the subsequent resignation, what did you make of that day or even that three minutes that happened there? I mean, I caught the end of it right before I went to bed in London like 11 o’clock on a Saturday, and it was just stranger than fiction to watch. What did you make of it?
31:25 Jim Rickards: Yeah, my wife and I were in the little TV room here, and we were watching a baseball game, but my wife thought that Trump was going to announce the VP pick at the rally.
31:36 That was not his plan, but she was very interested in that. So she comes out, opens a laptop, and she was watching live TV. So I heard it, she was watching it, and there’s something, all this stuff about, you know, fire. If you’re my guns, gunfire is distinct. You know it.
31:55 And I heard the pop, pop, pop, and I said, that’s a gun. My wife goes, oh, my God, it’s been shot. And I jumped up, and then we kind of took it from there. I was genuinely shocked, just, I mean, really, like, kind of, you know, kicked you in the gut. And, you know, my wife kind of talked politics, right?
32:12 I can hang out with me and not be subjected to that. But she said for a long time, because I’m, you know, I’m also a lawyer, and I’m like, you know, they tried to bankrupt them. They had two bogus impeachments, every accusation in the book, two federal cases, two state law cases, you know, what else? I mean, what else can you possibly do to the guy? Bankrupt him, embarrass him, put him in jail, call him an insurrectionist.
32:37 There was almost, and none of it worked. I mean, it’s, you know, these cases were on appeal, but Trump’s still standing. I was like, Elton Johnson, I’m still standing. And my wife would say, they’re going to have to shoot him. And, but she said that to me for months.
32:52 And I said, no, I mean, they won’t go that far. I should have known better. I do listen to her, but I’ll always say, no, they won’t go that far. Well, they did. Now, my view of what the Secret Service did, and, you know, I know a little bit about it, and I’ve fired AR-15s.
33:09 I’ve used the 556 NATO round, which is a lot more powerful than the 223. And, you know, with an iron sight, which this guy had, he did not have a telescopic sight. You know, 150 yards. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying it’s very doable.
33:26 You don’t have to be a marine sharpshooter to make that shot. And, you know, low recoil, big, you know, high capacity magazine was all completely doable. So then you go down the list. Well, what was the Secret Service doing? Why was there no one on the roof?
33:42 Why, you know, the guy had a rangefinder. Yeah, you know, well, what do you use rangefinders for? Well, golf and hunting. Well, this guy was hunting. He was hunting humans.
33:52 He flew a drone. What do you use drones for? Well, surveillance, measuring distances. And everyone’s like, oh, look at that guy. He’s got a rangefinder.
33:59 And the people were calling the police. I mean, the police were there. And this was being reported in. So we know this is not a conspiracy theory. We know that the Secret Service knew almost an hour before the shooting that there was a suspicious character, so-called person of interest, walking around the vicinity with rangefinders and then an earlier flown a drone.
34:22 The sharpshooters had him had the shooter in their sights. What were they waiting for? I mean, guys, a hundred hundred fifty hours away with a with a rifle, aiming at the president and you don’t take him out. What are they waiting for? Some lawyer to, you know, make a decision in Washington.
34:39 I don’t know. But the point is my view of the Secret Service, I don’t have enough information to say that they were actively involved in this assassination attempt. I had my suspicions. I can’t say that. What I can say is they let it happen, that it was a passive participation.
34:58 So they were nobody’s that you know, Occam’s razor says, you know, if there’s a simple explanation, a complicated explanation, go with a simple one. Pretty good advice most of the time, but not always. And in this case, there were just too many failures, one failure to OK, but nobody on the roof, nobody in the area, nobody confronting this guy, nobody detaining him, nobody shooting him when they had the chance. Nobody telling Trump, sorry, you can’t go on stage right now, there’s something going on.
35:31 By the way, they were not, it was not the regular Secret Service detail, it was the B team. What they did is they had surged their top people, including some of Trump’s people, to a Jill Biden rally in Pennsylvania, not far along, I mean, big stage, could have been a couple hundred miles, but they sent them to the Jill Biden rally and they took people who weren’t even Secret Service, they were DHS, which controls the Secret Service, they kind of seconded them, or like made them deputy, deputized them as Secret Service agents for the day, and put them on the detail. Now, there’s one woman, Secret Service agent, who was part of the group that got Trump off the stage.
36:13 Hey, that group, yeah, they jumped on the president, they put their bodies between the shooter and the president. I give full credit to that, that was heroic. But when they stood them up, she’s about five-seven, Trump’s six-three. How do you create a human shield of a six-three individual with a five-seven agent? You need six-four agents, I mean, and they’re around.
36:37 So things like that are just inexplicable. So my, and there’s so many of them, that if you say, which one does that go, one in a hundred chance, or one in a thousand chance, yeah, but when you multiply it all, you get to one in a million pretty quickly, meaning it’s not random. So what do we conclude from that? Again, I would need more evidence to say that the Secret Service tried to assassinate it, but I feel very comfortable saying, the Secret Service let it happen.
37:06 These people are out there, that’s why you have a Secret Service in the first place. Their job is to anticipate it. I once looked into it, back not recently, but a few years ago when the ISIS people were chopping people’s heads off in London and so forth, I had a kind of high-profile speaking event in Vienna, and I, you know, I had a bodyguard in London, guns in London, but I had an armed bodyguard for an OSC, but I was doing something else in Vienna, so I called my security firm, and I said, you know, could we get a security perimeter, whatever?
37:41 And they came back to me, and with what they said, well, if we do it, here’s what we’re going to do, because we’re the real deal. And I ended up not doing it, because it would have been like, I don’t know, $50,000 or something for a one-hour speech, but they said, you know, we look at everybody who’s in the city, we look at who’s coming and going, we do background checks, we scout the area, we search it, you know, metal detectors, you know. And I was like, hey, great, nice to know you’re out there, great job.
38:12 I decided not to do it. It turned out the event went fine. But that’s what professionals do, and the Secret Service are supposed to be professionals, and they did not do that. So I’m glad the director resigned. She should have resigned, you know, the night of the assassination attempt.
38:30 But they’re not off the hook. We’re going to be hearing a lot more about it.
38:35 Brian Rose: Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but one last thing. If the Secret Service let it happen, and that’s the best I can say about them, I believe they did, who was running the shooter?
38:45 Jim Rickards: Because this is where the Secret Service and the CIA can’t, you know, the CIA doesn’t have to tell the Secret Service, hey, we’re running a shooter. All they have to say is, keep up the sloppy work, you know, or don’t say anything. Just knowing the Secret Service is doing what they’re doing, somebody else can then run a shooter. And there’s so much we don’t know about that, you know. You hear about a second shooter in the water tower.
39:11 How many, where did the bullets actually come from that killed and wounded the individuals in the crowd? Where are they from? Where are they from another angle? Tons of logistics, tons of forensics, and we don’t know the answer to any of it, and the FBI as usual is lying to us. So the Secret Service has climbed up and the FBI won’t say, and when they do say something, they lie.
39:35 So we don’t know. It may take a long time.
39:37 Brian Rose: Yeah, a bunch of questions there. If I’m having flashbacks to the JFK assassination, I think it was a combination of super lax security and a lot of things just didn’t happen that day, and people didn’t show up to protect in addition with kind of that intentional shooter that kind of got that result. Yeah, right.
39:53 A couple things I want to ask you before you go. First of all, Bill Ackman of Pershing Square runs a huge hedge fund, tweeted out like a couple days ago, if I were China, I would invade Taiwan now. And I guess he’s addressing this issue that now that Biden is effectively past the torch, we got a lame duck president for six months, and if you’re any major power, why not do something now? Because who the hell is going to make a decision? It’s so not clear who would right now.
40:19 And that’s a fear that I definitely woke up with the other day. So I want to get your thoughts on that. And then, you know, you mentioned rigging elections. I’m curious, with all eyes on that, how could it be done and how can’t it be done maybe this time? So those are kind of my two.
40:35 Jim Rickards: Yeah, well, Bill Ackman showed that he knows nothing about military operations over China. So, okay, Bill. By the way, I was doing an interview the other day and I said, the hedge fund billionaires, okay, they’re doing something right, the hedge fund. You know, nice job, you’re a billionaire, congratulations, they’re a bunch of them. I include them in my list of factors when I’m doing predictive analytics and, you know, predicting elections or whatever as a contrary indicator.
41:04 Like if Ray Dalio, Bill Ackman, Ken Griffin, you know, Ken Griffin and all these guys have a view. They’re almost always wrong. It’s incredible how wrong they are. Because they got so much money, like, oh, I’m a smart guy, I must know everything. They just don’t know.
41:20 These are the people who supported Mitt Romney, Nikki Haley, John McCain, you know, they always pick the loser. Now, in the end, when you get down to two, okay, maybe they picked the right one, but that’s easy. But, so I just kind of shake my head. But the people you’re mentioning, Brian, you’re right about the latest news. These are all the, this is the Nikki Haley team, so you were wrong last time, probably wrong again.
41:45 China is not ready to invade Taiwan. Let’s just look at the Chinese perspective. They, of course, they want to be unification. They always have, and that’s the top of their list. But they’re also, it’s a 5,000-year-old civilization.
42:02 I don’t quite consider civilization to be an institution, but it is civilization. The continuity. Now, it’s, you know, people say so-and-so is on the wrong side of history. History doesn’t have sides. It’s more of a sine wave or maybe a circle.
42:18 And yes, and China is understood as centuries of centralization followed by decentralization. It’s like a, it’s like a concertina theory. It just goes like this. Right now, we’re in a, we’re close to a period of maximum centralization, which makes it pretty easy to forecast that China’s going to start to fall apart in the near future. They want Taiwan.
42:44 Of course they do. But what’s the best way to get Taiwan? Well, the answer is keep your agents working inside Taiwan to promote the Kuomintang, the KMT, which is the one of the two big political parties. They’re two, one KMT is the successor to Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist army. And they’re now a major political party.
43:05 I think it’s the democratic people’s party. I may have that name slightly wrong, but they’re the ones who are more pro-independence, even though they haven’t declared independence. So that, that democratic pro-independence party is now in power, but it’s a thin margin. All the Chinese have to do is wait for the Kuomintang to win an election, which they will eventually. And there are a lot of people in the KMT who are willing to basically agree to reunification with some autonomy.
43:38 It’ll look a little bit like the Hong Kong handover, and we know how that turned out. So if you’re China, why would you want to basically do something that would put the world on the brink of World War II, or sorry, World War III, nuclear war, bring a blockade that we haven’t seen since Lord Nelson and Napoleon on your doorstep, trash your economy, kill millions?
44:03 Brian Rose: What about any other actions from a major power? Is this the time to do it, or is that kind of checker’s thinking, would this actually be a perfect opportunity for Kamala to show some strength?
44:16 So in fact, maybe it’s not the right time to touch the U.S. when it’s not clear who’s in power.
44:21 Jim Rickards: Well, is it strength or stupidity? I mean, that’s the point. There is.
44:24 To answer your question, Brian, there is a major war going on. It’s right on your doorstep. It’s in Ukraine. And that started in 2022. Well, the Special Military Operations started in February 2022.
44:38 The war in some ways started in 2008 at the Bucharest Conference when George W. Bush said that Ukraine and Georgia should join NATO. Putin invaded Georgia about six months later, and you’ve never heard from Georgia since, but certainly not NATO. Then in 2014, Obama, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken ran a coup d’etat, MI6, I should add, ran a coup d’etat in Kiev, chased out a duly elected president. I mean, Poroshenko was, you know, he might have been a little pro-Russian or willing to sign a trade deal with Russia, which is what he was talking about at the time, but he was elected.
45:19 They had an election, and that wasn’t good enough for the warmongers in the U.S. and Whitehall, so they ran him out of town, put in a puppet, and then a few months after that, Russia took over Crimea. So it’s like, what part of annexation of Asia do you not understand? Every time the West and NATO, the collective West, pushed Ukraine close to NATO, Russia took another piece, whether it was Georgia, Crimea, and Putin hasn’t done one thing that he didn’t say he was going to do.
45:53 He’s very deliberate, does not shoot from the hip, gets a lot of good advice, but the U.S. wanted the war. See, that’s the point. It’s not like we stumbled into a blindfold. It’d be like, okay, let’s keep pushing and let’s get the war going, and they did.
46:09 Now, you know, I would say 500,000 dead Ukrainians. It was 400,000, but they’re losing about 1,500 dead per day along the battle lines. So 500,000 dead Ukrainians later, how did Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson feel about that? Well, to answer your question, Kamala Harris is pro-Ukrainian. She wants more money, more weapons, and more dead Ukrainians.
46:35 So I think your question, you know, well, how will she show her foreign policy chops? She already has, using the same failed policies and killing more Ukrainians. And, you know, is she going to bomb the Houthis? You know, they always, in Yemen they’ve, I don’t know if anyone noticed, but, pardon me, if anyone’s noticed, but the Suez Canal shut and has been for a while. Some vessels going through, it’s not physically shut, but the large crewed carriers, they’re going around, capable of good hope, which, you know, you can do it.
47:16 And they’re in pretty place, but ads do expense and uncertainty and time and a lot else. And they say, well, let’s bomb the Houthis into the Stone Age. And I make the point that they’re in the Stone Age. They never left. You can’t get them back there.
47:29 So she doesn’t show, she’s not, well, ideologically she’s not attuned, but intellectually she’s not smart enough to critique any of that. And the Republicans, some Republicans applaud it. The warmongers like Lindsey Graham and others probably favor, they won’t say this, but they probably favor a continuation of the war, which would mean voting for her. So the short answer is China’s not going to invade Taiwan. Will they be provocative? Sure.
47:57 They just flew a couple nuclear bombers to the edge of Alaska the other day. I mean, that does happen from time to time, but the time is interesting. Biden’s a lame duck in more ways than one. I agree with people that kind of ask rhetorically, well, if he’s not fit to run, how is he fit to serve? Well, the answer is he’s not fit to do either, but the Biden crime family needs some protection, so they’re going to hang him up for six more months.
48:27 Biden is, I mean, his mind is not completely gone. It’s just half gone. But in his lucid moments, he thinks of himself as a world historical figure. He’s got this narcissistic side that doesn’t come out. There’s Scranton Joe, Amtrak Joe, and all this stuff.
48:43 He actually kind of ranks himself in his own mind with, I think, great presidents of all time. So in his mind, he wants to complete the legacy, complete the term. He will, in the fullness of time, be ranked as perhaps the worst president in U.S. history. You always have to take account of James Buchanan.
49:00 He was the last president before the Civil War. Last chance to avoid the Civil War, he failed utterly. So he’s usually ranked last. But Biden might actually be last to her, or, you know, 45th out of 46 or whatever. But she’s the same.
49:14 I mean, I could just get out of a list of policies. I mean, I’ll just do it quickly. Ukraine, the green news scam, EVs, windmills, no oil and gas leases, more welfare, week-end defense, racial division, student loan forgiveness, and men and women’s sports. Those are all Biden policies, and they’re all Kamala Harris policies. So people who say, well, what will, you know, go back to your earlier question, what if she wins?
49:42 What will the policy look like? The answer is more of the same. But the same is pretty horrific for the country and more means more, so that would be a disaster. Now, the, sorry, Brian, the second part of your question. Last question was the rigging question, you know.
49:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah. How could they rig the election? Have things changed? Have they potentially got worse? I know it’s a very localized issue, and there’s not much maybe certain people can do about it.
50:10 How does that work and how does it play out?
50:12 Jim Rickards: Yeah, I think there’s less opportunity for pre-printed ballots. I mean, they found mail-in ballots that were uncreaked. It’s like they had never been put in an envelope and they all had the same check marks on them. I think that would be more difficult this time because there’ll be more poll watchers.
50:27 The Republicans are better organized than they. I do think Larry Trump’s doing a very good job as vice chair of the RNC at getting at that. They’ve got tons of lawyers, tons of money, so they kind of want it. But the way you do it is ballot harvesting and drop boxes. And this is where the immigrants come in because they’re giving illegal immigrants.
50:49 I mean, you come across the border. Once you get checked in, they hand you a cell phone, like a $1,000 debit card, you know, a letter that says you can get on any train. You don’t have to show ID or anything. No background checks on transportation for TSA and all that stuff. But they locate them.
51:08 They know where they are. They don’t tell the Immigration Naturalization Service or the Customs and Border Patrol, but the government knows where they are and various concentrations. And they’ll get ballots in their names and fill them out and throw them in a drop box. And, you know, they say the drop boxes have cameras. Well, not all of them do.
51:29 And a little piece of duct tape will take care of the camera. So I expect that’s how they do it. They won’t match signatures. They won’t verify the ballots. And that will start happening.
51:40 Well, it’s pre-produced now, but that will start happening right after Labor Day because most states allow two months of early voting.
51:48 Brian Rose: Wow. That’s a scary scenario. Jim, we’re going to have to have you back, obviously, before the election, maybe even a few weeks before, to talk about the State of the Union. Who knows where we could be at that point?
52:00 Like you said, maybe a new candidate for the Democrats, maybe another assassination attempt. I don’t really know, but it’s definitely going to be an interesting few months.
52:10 Jim Rickards: Yeah, I agree completely. Fantastic.
52:12 Brian Rose: All right. Thank you, Jim.
52:14 We appreciate. We’ll have you back on soon. Your new book, Money, GBTAI, and The Threat to the Global Economy, will be coming out a little bit later this year. Always appreciate your time.
52:21 Jim Rickards: Thank you so much.
52:22 Brian Rose: Thanks. And thanks, everybody, for watching. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Bye.
